[Space Gypsy Fiction] Zero Card

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Artemis
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[Space Gypsy Fiction] Zero Card

Post by Artemis »

Somewhere in the Jovian Sector, near the Amalthea Skipway

The combination of the freighter's old, mildewy smell, the scent and feel of his own sweat, and the not-quite-menthol aftertaste of the nicotine inhaler that Sergeant Ed Folgers, Jovian Alliance Customs and Patrol Service, was forced to use in place of his preferred Martian cigarettes, was enough to make the man's throat close up. Starships, most people who'd never been there believed, were clean, sterile environments, made up of white walls and floors, florescent lighting, clean, if stale, recycled air, and the gentle, steady hum of reactors and drive cores. Folgers had been doing this long enough to know that, for the most part, that was complete bullshit. At least it was on the ships he and his men routinely boarded in the course of their duty.

This ship in particular was ancient, older than Folgers, older even than some the colonies on the worlds it had been, according at least to its inventory and flight plan, on its way to deliver goods to. According to the old nuke-fish reactor's registry plate, it was a '37 Lockheed-Ford StarMack Personal Freighter, the great-grandfather of the StarMacks most people were familiar with. It was a mid-range ship, not really intended to go outside the star system it had been built in, but according to the just-as-ancient flight recorder, this thing had been practically everywhere, even into Klashie and Bug space. The upgraded, illegally so, Second Space drive might have had something to do with that.

“What's in the hold?” Folgers asked Ericson, his second for this job.

“Lot of shit, going a lot of shit places,” Ericson said, twirling a finger in front of a sheet of glowing infoparchment, scrolling through the ship's inventory and manifest. “Three thousand kilos of Ionian soil on its way to farmers on Czernobog, a crate full on decorative rugs, everything from old Navajo to stuff your grandma might have sewn, going to a private collector on Avalon, another crate full of paperbacks-”

“Paperback what?”

“Books, I think.”

“Right. Go on.”

“Anyway, those were going to a children's hospital on Ceres. About a hundred cans of coffee, all going to some Klashie planet, can't pronounce the name. A coil of copper wiring, almost half a kilometer long altogether, going to somewhere on Gilead, a crate of toothpaste, also going to Gilead. Couple dozen crates of bug spray, to Olympia. 'Fridgerated crate full of Italian sausage, turkey sausage, salami, balogna, you name it, all of it going to Oryam.” Ericson cleared his throat. “And five crates with more locks and passkeys than should seem necessary, considering how harmless the rest of this stuff is.”

Folgers grunted, and took another hit of nicotine. God, but he wanted a real cigarette. The oxygen content in the cargo bay was too low to kindle a flame – real good for keeping your precious cargo from catching fire, not so good for Folgers' vintage Zippo lighter. “You scan it?”

Ericson grinned bitterly. “X-rays, sonar, particle drill. As far as we can tell, the thing's empty. Which doesn't explain why the crates all mass in at about four thousand kilos each, and don't have space for a cubic inch of air inside them.”

“Show me.”

Ericson led Foglers back to the crates in question. On the outside, they didn't look like anything special – teal-gray plastic, reinforced with a steel loading jacket. No stickers or holopaint to list their contents, no special notices saying if said contents were sensitive to heat, pressure, atmosphere, or gravity. The only thing interesting were the magnetic padlocks, dozens of them on each crate, clamped so densely around the openings that it would take almost an hour, even with a good lock-pick, to get them all off. A strip of infoparchment taped to each crate also flashed a single message: “Passkey required.”

“Well,” Folgers said. “Theories?”

“Its dense, whatever it is,” Ericson said. “Explains the weight of the crates, their imperviousness to scanning, and why they're in the middle of the cargo bay. Pilot didn't want it throwing off his maneuvering.”

“Radiation?”

“Nothing bad. The crates aren't lead-lined, and our badges would be going off if it was anything harmful.” Ericson sighed. “Know what I think?”

“No, Ericson, that's why I asked you for theories,” Folgers said, rolling his eyes.

Ericson, undeterred by his Sergeant's flippancy, continued. “Know that living hull stuff the Commies use? Slick, Sparkle, something like that?”

“Shine,” Folgers said, nodding.

“Yeah,” Ericson said, snapping his fingers in recognition. “That stuff's pretty dense, has to be to soak up rads and absorb impacts. Grows like crazy, too, from what I hear, like mushrooms on Takeoff. Would have filled up the crates in no time, even if they'd just started out as droplets of the stuff.”

“You think this guy was smuggling Shine? Why?”

“Maybe so someone could clone it, make their own. It's Commie-exclusive – what if someone in the U.N., or even a Klashie or Bug, wanted to steal the recipe?”

Folgers considered it, then shook his head. “We've found derelict Commie ships that were covered with the stuff, alive and dead. We tried figuring it out a bunch of times, but shit's genetics are, believe it or not, encoded.”

“Like Tekks?”

“Nah, those are just really complex, hard to sort out. I mean, when the Algians created Shine, they wrote the genetic code, literally, in code. And it gets more complicated every day. Shine literally re-writes its own genetics to make itself more complex and confusing. It's 97% junk DNA, just to prevent anyone but the Algians from making any of it.”

Ericson whistled. “Seems like a lot of work.”

“It's the Commonwealth,” Folgers said, sneering at the very word. He'd been in the war with the Klashies. Not on the front lines, like he'd wanted, but as a logistics officer for 7th Fleet around Mars. He'd been there when the graceful, terrible shapes of the Commonwealth ships had rippled out of Second Space, weapon bays already open, ready to drop over three teratons-worth of bottled plasma on Mars if the U.N. and the Confederation didn't end the war. He'd looked into the arrogant, self-righteous face of the Algian commander when she'd broadcast the ultimatum. “Never underestimate the capabilities of madmen with big guns.”

Ericson didn't say anything to that. He'd been too young to fight in the war and, like a lot of Jovians of his generation, viewed aliens as weird people he didn't want anything to do with, more than as any real menace. “Well, if we can't crack the code, can we still use the stuff if we get out hands on it?”

“Oh, sure,” Folgers said, after a moment. “It'll die off in about four months without proper gene-therapy, but until then its hell on wheels as a hull coating. You can survive a lot of nasty stuff if you've got a coat of Shine on your starship.”

“But our missing pilot wasn't using it,” Ericson said. “At least not on this ship.”

“No,” Folgers agreed. He thought for a moment. “No, he was gonna stick this on something else. Something flashier, meatier. This old rustbucket was just hauling it somewhere for him.” Folgers looked around the cargo bay. “I bet you a small moon that none of this other crap was ever gonna end up where the manifest says it was, and that the flight plan is complete bogus.”

“So, where was it really going?” Ericson asked.

“Dunno,” Folgers said, looking back down at the inhaler, then putting it away. He still wanted a cigarette, and dammit, he was going to have one as soon as he got back to his own ship, but for now the inhaler wasn't doing anything but make his head swim. “The ship isn't gonna tell us – the navcom was literally ripped out of the console. Only way to know for sure is to find the pilot. The smuggler.” Folgers smiled. He liked smuggling cases. They looked real good on annual reviews, if they were handled correctly. “Search the cabin section. I want Forensics looking for fingerprints, urea emissions, hair, anything, and I want our guys to look for personal effects. Probably didn't have bring with him, for such a straight run, but he might have panicked in his hurry to abandon ship and left something.”

Ericson nodded, and put a finger to his jaw to activate his walkie-talkie. A previously-invisible infotat flickered to life around his ear and the place where his fingers met his face, and he began relaying Folgers' orders.

Half an hour and a blissful cigarette later, Folgers and six other Customs officers were doing a passable impression of a pack of wolverines on the StarMack's cabin. Forensics had found nothing – no prints except for those of a generic-size pair of EVA boots, and the pilot had apparently vented the cabin's atmosphere before rabitting, because there was no physical trace of the pilot, not a single loose hair or a fraction of a belch to give his identity away. So Folgers had resorted to searching the old fashioned way.

Ericson stepped over a fallen computer terminal, carrying something in a clear static baggie. “Sergeant? Might have found something.”

Folgers, currently shredding the leather flight seat with his old service knife, looked up. “Yeah? Hit me.”
Ericson flicked the baggie in Folgers' direction, and Folgers almost reach out to snatch it before he caught the barest glimpse of what was inside. “Jesus!” he yelled, and ducked behind the chair, the baggie and its sole passenger, a brightly-painted, larger-than-average card, passing harmlessly over his head. “Sweet starlight, you have any idea what you just tossed at me, Ericson?!”

The young Customs officer was trying very hard not to stammer. “Well, uh, I, well, no sir?”

Folgers growled to himself, and pushed a button on the knife's pommel. The sharp blade retracted into the handle, and after Folgers had given the pommel a one-quarter turn, a long rod with a pair of grasper arms at the end replaced it. Folgers reached for the bag, grabbed it with the tweezers, and carefully held it up to the dim cabin light. “I can't believe it,” Folgers muttered, looking up at it.

“What is it, sir?” Ericson asked.

“You never seen one of these before?” Folgers asked. “Well, obviously you haven't, or you wouldn't have thrown it at me. It's a multicard, very, very illegal.” Folgers set the baggie with the card down on the chair, carefully opened it up, and took out the card with the tweezers. By now, Folgers had accumulated quite the audience from his men, curious at his outburst. “Specialized infoparchment,” he began, “sandwiched between two layers of interface tape, then two more layers of foglet reservoir. Cover them with normal paper, disguise them as playing cards, business cards, whatever.”

“What do they do, sir?” Ericson asked.

“All kinds of things, most of them nasty,” Folgers said. “I've seen one completely melt a government computer's security system, just by being in the same room with it. Some of them are weapons, loaded with micro-explosives or fitted with razor edges. Really, you can program a multicard to be anything you need, just by writing a program for the foglets. No idea what this one does, though.”

“I've never seen a card looked like that before,” one of the officers said. “What is it, a little painting? Reproduction art?”

Folgers sneered. “It's a tarot card. Old, old old old superstition, fortune-telling bullshit. This one, apparently, is 'The Fool.'” Folgers shook his head. “Goddamn Space Gypsies. We've been had, boys.”

“Why?” Ericson asked.

“Because this is literally our smuggler's calling card. He wanted us to find this. You boys ever heard of Zero Card?”
They had. Their reactions were a mixture of amazement and dread.

“Well,” Ericson said. “I feel stupid, now. I mean, the card's got a great big '0' right at the top there-”

“Ericson, don't!” Folgers yanked the card back, but it was too late. Ericson's finger had just barely brushed the card's surface, but as soon as it did, the young Customs officer went completely slack, falling to the deck, his eyes rolling up into the back of his head.

The cabin fell silent, as Ericson lay completely still. Finally, someone woke up enough to check for vitals – he was still breathing, and they could even see Ericson's eyes rolling around under their lids as if he were dreaming. “Ericson,” Folgers said to the man, shaking him. “Dammit, officer, wake up!”

A full minute after exposure to the card – which Folgers had dumped into the StarMack's trash incinerator, evidence protocol be damned – Ericson's eyes snapped open, and he said in a toneless voice: “The Fool represents innocence, daring, and the unknown. It is the card of children and adventurers. It may mean a desire for a new beginning, or a re-evaluation of old ideas. It is the beginning of a journey.” Then, in a small, frightened, somehow childlike voice. “Who are all you people? Where am I?” A blink. “Who am I?”

Folgers sighed, shook his head, and wondered how the hell he was going to write up the report for this incident, let alone the letter to Ericson's wife and parents.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: [Space Gypsy Fiction] Zero Card

Post by Booted Vulture »

Very cool stuff Arty. It like Firefly.... IN SPAAACE. (Hey... waitaminute! :P)

IF it followed Customs people. Which is a cool tact, usual custom offficers are the bad guys after the heroic chaotic good smugglers. Seeing them as protagonists is interesting.
Ah Brother! It's been too long!
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Artemis
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Re: [Space Gypsy Fiction] Zero Card

Post by Artemis »

Well, truth be told it's going to be following this Zero Card character, a.k.a. Horatio James Troubador III, one of the most famous Space Gypsies in the galaxy. But we've not seen the last of Sergeant Folgers, no sirree.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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